A 21st Century Man Accidentally Launched in the 20th

His name was Fereidoun M. Esfandiary but he changed it to FM 2030. Born in Persia, a man of dark and intense good looks, he lived and studied in London, New York, Berkeley, Lebanon, Miami, Jerusalem, Damascus, Los Angeles and a dozen other venues. But no city could contain him for long, and it is arguable that Planet Earth couldn't, either: his mind was simply too large. His philosophical explorations took him to places that even science fiction writers hesitated to venture, espousing Nostradamus-like predictions that have come to pass with haunting prescience.

His views and forecasts were both provocative and visionary and uncannily right on the mark. At the time he made his forecasts both in his books and in the media they were controversial and viewed as impossible. Now, we take many of them for granted. Just an example of some of his forecasts: in the 1970's and 1980's as everyone was concerned with the weapons race and security, FM's projections showed the reasons for the de-acceleration of the arms race; as early as the 1970's he anticipated the breakdown of Communism; while the Club de Rome and others made dire predictions, worrying about and raising alarms regarding scarcity of energy, resources, food and water, FM in an article published in The New York Times wrote about the Age of Abundance; in the early 1970's he carried out and anticipated our current dress down mode; his book Telespheres anticipated telemedicine, teleducation, telebanking, etc.; as early as 1974 he was lecturing and writing articles about physical longevity and the possibility of physical immortality.

He was worldly, unworldly and otherworldly all at the same time. Born in 1930, at age 18 he was a member of the Iranian Olympic team. In time he served on a United Nations council formed to address the Palestinian question. In the 1960's he began producing a unique body of literary work ranging from speculative novels to futurist manifestos to treatises about self-realization. His name-change was motivated by scorn for outmoded tribal naming conventions. He also believed he would live to celebrate his 100th birthday in 2030, a dream that was not to be realized owing to a fatal cancer.

E-Reads has begun to reissue FM's work in e-book and trade paperback format. His comic masterpiece Identity Card is a tragedy clothed in wit. In an attempt to flee his underdeveloped, bureaucratic country, a Middle Easterner searches for every possible way to obtain an identity card that will allow him to leave Iran, but his quest for freedom is soon mired in ceremonious formalities that reveal the fatuousness of modern civilization.

Another novel, Day of Sacrifice, was selected by the New York Herald Tribune as one of the best novels of 1959. It has been translated into eleven languages and is on the required reading list of the U.S. State Department. London's Punch described it as, "A splendid piece of work....What is so impressive about the book is the remarkable assurance with which it is written, the remarkable professional and philosophical assurance of say, Albert Camus, in "The Stranger," a book which it somewhat resembles....I find it a most distinguished novel on a most important theme..."

For more about FM 2030 read Wikipedia's profile.

- Richard Curtis